The transportation of goods from point of origin to a destination plays an important role in the world economy, and often goods are to be moved through a complex network of carriers. In the context of global commerce, delivery of an order to a destination from the point of manufacture or packaging may traverse various legs comprising (for example) an overland segment (e.g., by truck), a segment across an ocean (e.g., by seagoing vessel), possibly an air segment (e.g., by aircraft), and in some cases even additional segments (e.g., additional overland segments) before reaching a final destination. Some order management systems propose static routing for orders, and techniques for such routing may account for shipment using as many legs as may be needed to route from a source location to a destination location. Some systems attempt to account for practical considerations (e.g., timing of delivery) as well as efficiency considerations (e.g., aggregate cost incurred by traversing all legs of an itinerary), yet these legacy techniques fall short.
Some management systems propose routing for orders based on optimization of traversals over a transportation network using the original source-point of an order and the final intended destination route-point of the order, and then consolidate orders after finding a sufficiently fast and sufficiently low-cost itinerary. However, as the number of geographically-nearby source points becomes larger (e.g., when shipping a relatively larger number of relatively smaller orders) this approach to routing often still leaves the routing from original source-point of an order to a consolidation point (e.g., a crossdock, a port, etc.) unaddressed. A (newer) order may be available for shipment in the same or nearby location where a truck is transporting (older) orders, however without employing the disclosed techniques, that newer order might not be picked up by the truck—even though the truck is in the right location to pick up the newer order, and even though the truck has enough capacity to transport the newer order.
Indeed, legacy order management systems make unwarranted assumptions, and propose routing for orders only after simplifying routing problem by collapsing a large group (e.g., possibly hundreds or more) of geographically-nearby route-points into a single route-point (e.g., a route-point that is geographically-representative of the large group). Including these unwarranted assumptions in order to reduce or simplify the routing problem leads to poor routing plans, and what is needed are techniques to avoid making the aforementioned unwarranted assumptions while still being able to solve or optimize the overall routing problem. Such legacy approaches make unwarranted assumptions at least in that they build pallets (e.g., grouping based on geographically-nearby route-points) and then assess the mode of shipment to transport the pallet(s). This approach limits the possibilities for shipment modes since once a pallet is built it cannot be easily split (e.g., to account for a change in transportation mode, or to account for an additional mode or route).
What is needed is a technique or techniques that assemble a set of candidate pallet packing possibilities, and then assess the candidate packing possibilities to identify low cost and feasible routes.
Further, legacy systems fail to account for changes in the status of orders once a routing plan has been determined. For example, a plan to pick up (e.g., via overland carrier) five orders from Springfield, Ill. to be delivered to a port at Chicago, Ill. might have been planned and disseminated to the carrier or carriers. Yet, that overland movement from Springfield to Chicago takes more than a day end-to-end. During the period of the overland movement, new orders might arrive (e.g., new orders ready for pick-up in a suburb of Chicago), and those new orders might be efficiently picked up en route to Chicago.
Legacy techniques are rife with erroneous assumptions. What's needed are techniques that eliminate or ameliorate erroneous assumptions in order to achieve cost and latency reductions when shipping through a transportation network.